


Scar Stories

by Sholio



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Canon, Sibling Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 12:15:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29332185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: There was an instant when Ward could have fed the car accident story to Danny. Danny would probably have believed him. If there was one thing he knew he was good at, it was lying to people who cared about him.But he hesitated, and when he looked up, he saw Danny's expression change: the quick flash of understanding, the unspoken "Oh."
Relationships: Ward Meachum & Danny Rand
Comments: 8
Kudos: 37
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	Scar Stories

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kameiko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kameiko/gifts).



It was a fine white scar, curving across Ward's inner arm. Not really visible except in the right light.

But the light was right that day, sunlight slanting through the window of the coffee shop as he reached across the table to Danny's side for the creamer—not really thinking about it, mind a million miles away, scrolling through Rand emails on his phone. He was still wearing a shirt, he hadn't quite unbent enough to run around in a T-shirt _yet_ , but his sleeves were rolled up. The coffee shop had air conditioning, but it was approximately a hundred thousand degrees outside, the air like a hot wet towel.

"The company isn't going to go under if you take a day off, Ward," Danny said, and then, almost in the same breath, "What happened?"

"Reichter in R&D crossed his wires on two shipments of our second-generation artificial limbs, is what—"

"No, I mean there," Danny said, and Ward looked up, and saw Danny's attention on his arm.

He had never had to hide that one from Joy. She knew all about it, or at least she knew about the surgery and the three steel pins he had in his forearm from the spiral fracture he got in a "car accident." He had never learned to be careful about it, the way he did with some of the other little souvenirs Dad had left him with. Dad was always pretty good about not making marks that would scar, but not when he really lost control. By reflex, Ward had gotten in the habit of hiding those scars, keeping it all under wraps. But not that one, because he'd never had to.

There was an instant when he could have fed the car accident story to Danny. Danny would probably have believed him. If there was one thing he knew he was good at, it was lying to people who cared about him.

But he hesitated, and when he looked up, he saw Danny's expression change: the quick flash of understanding, the unspoken "Oh." And then there was a moment when it hung in the air between them, heavy enough to press down on the table, while Danny tried to find something to say.

They'd had fewer times like that lately. But it still happened. Ward was already tense and on edge from the heat, from the difficulty of dealing with Rand business across 5000 miles of ocean, and occasionally from dealing with Danny as well, in the close quarters of buses and trains and hotel rooms.

He got up and grabbed his phone.

"Ward," Danny said, starting to rise as well.

"Your turn to pay," Ward tossed over his shoulder, and Danny, Lawful Good paladin that he was, turned back toward the counter on pure habit before realizing they'd paid already when they picked up their drinks. But Ward was already out the door and trying to lose himself on the busy Bangkok street.

*

It was dumb. He didn't speak the language, didn't know where he was going, wasn't even sure he could find his way back to their hotel because Danny had been leading and they'd taken buses to get here.

But he walked anyway, just walked.

Danny texted him a couple of times. Ward ignored them and eventually turned his phone off.

He ended up on a concrete river overlook. It was still stupidly hot out here, enough to make New York summers feel like cool Alpine meadows. When Danny sat down beside him and shoved a bottle of water into his hand, he was too exhausted and hot and thirsty to even mind. Much.

"Were you following me?"

"We learned how to do a tail in K'un-Lun—"

"Danny, please God, do not tell me K'un-Lun stories right now." 

"Okay, but please drink that. You need to stay hydrated in this heat."

Ward glared at him to let Danny know how he felt about being hovered over, and then gulped down half the bottle. His throat cramped painfully. Okay, yeah, that was probably necessary.

"Can we get out of the sun?" Danny asked. "There's a place over there we can get some iced coffee."

It was crowded, and they ended up at a sidewalk table with a couple of horrendously sweet iced coffees and a colorful umbrella above them keeping off the worst of the sun while an occasional breeze stirred Ward's sweat-damp hair around. This was making him miss the nice air-conditioned coffee shop he'd stormed out of, but he wasn't about to admit it.

At least Danny looked a little wilted too, his blond mop dark with sweat and his T-shirt clinging damply. He had a light flush of sunburn across his nose and forearms. Ward was pretty sure he'd burned a little too, but at least _he_ wore sunscreen. Danny seemed to believe that the power of chi and wishful thinking were good protection against skin cancer.

"So I know you don't want to hear about K'un-Lun right now," Danny began. 

Ward sighed deeply. "This is the prelude to you telling me another story about goats and plum wine, isn't it?" He took a slurp of the iced coffee.

Danny leaned back in his chair and crossed one sandaled foot behind the other ankle. He rolled his T-shirt sleeve up over his shoulder.

"Flogged with a knotted cord," he said, turning his shoulder toward Ward.

It didn't look that bad, just a little rope of scar tissue. But something in the pit of Ward's stomach let go a little anyway, not so much at the scar so much as the idea of someone doing that to kid Danny. And by now he had seen enough of Danny with his shirt off (since taking his shirt off was not something Danny was shy about) to know that Danny had a lot of similar scars, mostly on his back.

It was stupid hypocrisy that he reacted to it that strongly, considering the things _he'd_ done to kid Danny. But there was still that instinctive gut-punch.

"We're comparing scars now?" he asked tightly.

Danny shrugged a little. "It's only fair."

"No it's not," Ward said, and he wasn't sure what he meant wasn't fair, exactly.

"Oh, check this one out," Danny said, and pulled up his T-shirt. Ward looked around wildly, because _public streetcorner, hello idiot,_ but Danny was already showing off what he had in the way of abs. "Bullet," he said.

"They have _bullets_ in K'un-Lun?" That was going to restructure Ward's entire understanding of the place.

"No, that was back in New York."

"Is there a point to all of this?"

Danny let his shirt drop back down. "The point is that our pasts are written on our skins. It's not just you, Ward. Mine is too. But I didn't have any right to ask about your scars unless you want to tell me."

"Did I give you any?"

"Give you any what?" Danny asked. He looked genuinely baffled.

"Scars, Danny. From when we were kids. I used to knock you around, and—I'm just curious."

Danny hesitated, looking at him. Then he leaned forward and pulled back his hair. It took Ward a minute to see what he was trying to show off, because it wasn't really obvious, just a whiter, shinier stripe under his hairline. "This was when you bumped me against the edge of the stairs, I think."

Ward didn't remember that in the slightest. But then he did actually remember something else. His childhood was mostly kind of vague; it was something he didn't like thinking about, and so he had let it fade into a haze of _it doesn't matter_ , a blur with only a few clear memories, mostly of Joy. But this was, well. Printed on him, so to speak. 

He pulled up his other sleeve, opposite the arm with the surgical scar. Pulled it up to the shoulder, revealing the faint tracery of a white half-moon imprinted there.

"This was you, I'm pretty sure," he said.

"What's me?" Danny asked, letting his hair fall back into place. He leaned forward.

"You bit me, Danny." And from what Ward remembered of it, the biting was fairly well provoked. It had actually drawn blood. There hadn't been many times when Danny had really snapped when they were kids, but when it came right down to it, Danny at his worst had been a biter. Ward had almost forgotten that before today.

"I bit you hard enough to leave a _scar?"_ Danny looked both horrified and fascinated. "Jeez, Ward. I'm sorry."

"You were like _three,_ so whatever."

"Yeah, but I still feel bad about it."

"Danny, you remember I literally—"

 _Tried to kill you,_ he almost said, but he bit down on it, and took a drink of his coffee instead. He had never _exactly_ apologized for those early days; like the painful edges on their shared past, it was something that they talked around, for the most part—a pit trap with stakes at the bottom that they stepped over carefully and made sure not to fall into.

Danny didn't say anything. After a minute, Ward said, "It was Dad."

Danny looked interested, listening quietly. Not speaking.

That made it easier, somehow, for Ward to go on. He turned his arm over, exposing the thin white scar. "Spiral fracture. He twisted, until it broke. I told Joy it was a car accident."

He said it matter-of-factly, like he was talking about a movie he'd seen. That made it a little easier.

He looked up and saw Danny's wide-eyed expression.

"So yeah. That's what that is."

"Ward, I—" Danny sucked in a breath. "I'm sorry. Really. It didn't occur to me until—"

Ward reached across the table and flicked the back of Danny's hand with thumb and forefinger. Danny shut up, looking startled, and a little hurt.

"I've never told anyone that, okay? Not Joy, not the doctor—nobody." He took a careful breath. It didn't feel like someone was gouging his ribs out from the inside. It didn't feel like much of anything, really, aside from a certain hard-to-define sense of relief and a little lingering embarrassment. "Just you, okay? So don't feel like you can't ask me about things."

"Ward, you literally walked out into the middle of like a hundred and fifteen degree heat wave," Danny said, with the look that meant he was digging in his heels a little. As usual.

"Okay, so I might get pissed, and you'll stalk me as usual—" This brought out Danny's recalcitrant look. "Oh my God, you climbed up a whole-ass _building_ just because you wanted to know where I was going at night—"

"What, your dad's building? That was like two years ago!"

"The point is, it's not like running away ever gets me anywhere." It was strangely satisfying to say it out loud. "So if you piss me off by accident, it happens. I'll get over it. You _know_ that."

Danny could probably have argued that point, given everything they'd been through in the first months after Danny came back to New York. But instead he said, looking contemplative, "I know." And then he added carefully, "Ward, I—you can tell me not to talk about things, okay?"

"I tell you not to talk about K'un-Lun all the time, and you completely ignore me."

Danny's tentative look faded into a scowl. "That's like more than half my life, so no."

Ward laughed, startling himself as much as Danny. "Idiot," he said. "Get us a refill on these, would you?"

It ... _meant_ something, that they didn't have to be careful with each other. Not as careful as they'd once been, anyway. It mattered that they could trespass on each other's broken places without breaking everything too badly to repair.

While Danny was getting the iced coffees, Ward took his phone out. It was still turned off—he'd forgotten about that—and he was just about to power it up to see how the situation was developing back at Rand when Danny reappeared, winding through the crowd of coffee shop patrons with a foam-topped glass in each hand.

Ward laid the phone on the table, facedown, still turned off. He took the cold glass that Danny pushed into his hand.

"I got some cookie things too," Danny said, laying a paper plate on the table. "Mango filled. And a bottle of water for you, because really, you gotta stay hydrated, Ward."

"Mother hen," Ward said, but there was a headache he hadn't even been entirely aware of, screwing its way into his temples. Okay, maybe this heat was a little beyond what he was used to.

"We don't have to keep talking about scars," Danny said. He sat back down and edged his chair sideways a little to stay under the shade of the umbrella.

"I know," Ward said. He hesitated, thought about the cigarette burn at the small of his back, the broken-glass scar on the back of his leg, missing hamstringing him by a fraction of an inch. All the little tells he'd made sure Joy never saw. All those memories of soaking up blood with cotton balls in hard-to-reach places.

"Look," he said at last. "You know what my dad is like. You know you're gonna see scars, if we keep—doing this."

"I know," Danny said. He swirled his straw around in the layered drink he'd gotten instead of just plain cold milk coffee. "I showed you the knotted rope thing. It's not the only one by a long shot."

"I know," Ward sighed. "This isn't a competition, you know."

"I know. I'm just saying, you're not the only one. You know?"

"I—" Ward began.

He was going to say that maybe, just maybe, being a virtual prisoner of his psychotically abusive dad for his entire life trumped Danny's history of—

Of being held prisoner in a magic city by psychotic monks. Okay, _fine._

"You know what?" he said. "I think I'd like to go back to the hotel room and watch some—does Thailand have anything like Bollywood? Whatever it has that's like that."

"We can get some ice cream on the way," Danny said.

What Ward really wanted was a tall glass of gin, but Danny found some amazing coconut ice cream with mango and sticky rice, basically an entire meal's worth. They took it back to the room and stretched out on their twin beds in the cool draft of the hotel's creaky and overloaded AC, and flipped between various channels on the TV, finally settling on a soap opera as dusk drew down, blue and spangled with city lights outside the window. Ward didn't understand any of the plot, but he didn't really care, eating his weight in ice cream and sticky rice while Danny tried to explain it based on his approximately 10 words of the Thai language, so _no,_ Danny.

Stretched out on the bed with his head resting on his arm, he caught a glimpse of the scar for a moment, a thin stitched line of white against his slightly tanned forearm. And it was _nothing._ A line like he might draw with a white pencil. That was all. In the grand scheme of things, it was absolutely fucking nothing. A symbol of Harold's footprint on the world, no more important than he wanted to make it.


End file.
